Friends of Science release May denialist ‘Update’

We were thrilled to see that our friends the Friends have released their latest denialist summary. As we eagerly read it, though, our enthusiasm was tempered as we realized all the arguments are zombies…

The front page shows their now-familiar graph of satellite-derived lower tropospheric temperatures. It’s so familiar, in fact, that the x-axis seems indicate we haven’t yet started 2010, once again confirming our motto ‘together with the Friends of Science, we can be twice as far behind the times!’. The Friends derive a negative temperature trend of 0.06 C/decade for a period of less than a decade (hehe!). We’ve discussed how clever they are to do this before (it’s also of course discussed in the literature), and we remain disappointed they haven’t adopted our suggestion of tilting the graph 16 degrees clockwise to match the tilt of the Earth’s axis and give even the long-term trend a negative slope. They’re also very clever to mention the upward temperature spikes associated with El Niño events, but not the complementary downward ones due to La Niñas.

2. It's the sun’s effect on cosmic rays, which control cloudiness (from FoS's refs 2 and 9 on their page 3): cosmic rays inversely correlate with sunspot activity:http://ulysses.sr.unh.edu/NeutronMonitor/Misc/neutron2.htmlso it's no surprise that after other natural variables and a secular linear trend (i.e. global warming) are removed, as shown in the FoS graph, there's a fair inverse correlation between temperature and cosmic ray counts. However, there’s no relationship between cosmic ray changes and cloud cover changes:http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2010/2009GL041327.shtmlOne of the authors of the studies FoS quote in support, Friis-Christensen, has disavowed a dominant cosmic-ray influence in recent decades.

Sadly, it seems, these 'new' arguments by our friends the Friends are actually old and have been countered many times by the warmalarmist conspiracy of consensus that dominates the corrupt, stinking morass of the peer-reviewed scientific literature. However, we continue to have faith that they'll come up with new ones. Carry on denying!

John A. Marr writes:I don't have time to debunk all these now but the CO2 is plant food meme always winds me up. a) Everyone knows about photosyntesis; 2) Plants do need CO2 (duh) but their growth rate depends also on soil, water, fertizer, absence of pests, competition from other plants, sunlight and, yes, climate: not too hot not too cold. Has anybody ever suggested getting rid of all the CO2 in the atmosphere? That's not even a straw man.

Dr S, you might also want to point out that CO2 is an integral part of beer and, gasp, gin and tonic. Do those greenies really want to take the fizz out of our beverages?

Also, oxygen is animal food and using it up to oxidize fossil organic matter is decreasing the atmospheric concentration of the stuff of life for us animals. What utter b*llocks. Grr John A. Marr

Dr. Schweinsgruber writes in response:Yeah, excellent idea: CO2 is pub food...as it is in beer. Too much CO2 in beer yields wheat beer!

Stop, if CO2 is integral part of beer, then FoS should focus on bringing the useless Canadian liquor laws down. No drinking age anymore...but first, send FoS to the library to update their outdated scientific knowledge they are spreading around!